How they tapped Woolies’ women

When
Woolworths
chief executive
Michael Luscombe
announced the chief logistics officer would be the head of human resources,
Julie Coates
, he sent a message through the retailing behemoth that the well-worn career paths no longer guaranteed success.

Not only had he appointed a woman to the very blokey division of moving goods around the country, but he chose a woman with no logistics experience. A woman from HR.

Human resources, like public relations, is a profession heavily dominated by women and, despite the wealth and breadth of experience that such roles can offer, rarely do even the brightest and most promising people in HR or PR make the transition into line management roles.

When Coates made the leap, it was 2007. Since then, she has well and truly broken the mould at Woolworths, becoming the highest-ranked female executive as director of Big W.

Coates’ replacement as director of human resources,
Kim Schmidt
, says the retailer has been on a six-year journey to transform itself into a female-friendly workplace.

“People with the right leadership capability are given the chance to do roles outside of the traditional career path," she says,

Coates and Schmidt are the two women on the eight-seat management board. Debra Singh, who also spent several years in HR, is now general manager of consumer electronics.

At the start of the process, Woolworths had only 16 per cent women in 400 senior executive positions, despite 55 per cent of employees (or team members) being women. Today, participation has risen to 27 per cent.

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That performance is still not good enough, Schmidt acknowledges, but it is a good start and the result of a lot of hard work and determination to discover what the company’s female employees want and need. Schmidt was speaking at a breakfast hosted last week by Directioneering in Sydney.

Critical for Woolies was the ability to bypass the traditional route to line management. The customary way was to start on the shop floor, work your way up to store manager, area manager, regional manager and then into head office as buyer. Then, the upwardly mobile might be able to be promoted into the executive level.

That was a very long process and it tended to eliminate women, says Schmidt.

Another step was to make it easier for women to stay.

Traditionally, in retailing, there are peak-time restrictions on when people are allowed to take holidays.

As such, employees were not able to take leave from October (when the pre-Christmas stock started arriving) to the end of the Christmas period, which could extend out to mid-January.

This situation was disastrous for women, many of whom would quit their job so they could be with their children in school holidays.

Schmidt says the restrictions were lifted at the executive level – because there was no particular need for them to be there at that time – and the restricted periods were shortened for other employees.

Midway through 2008, Woolies became Australia’s largest private employer to offer paid maternity leave – up to eight weeks at full pay.

Schmidt says the company also took another look at the way women were treated during and after their time at home with their babies.

Part-time work, job sharing at executive level and targets to get women into management were also introduced.